Books

Textbooks are reserved for classes and articles are reserved for research – right? Nope! Again my practicum has exposed me to another way to perform research. And once again, I am realizing that I have not read a book for research purposes because as an undergraduate student I would not have had the time or the inclination. But now as a graduate student, I am interested in reading about this topic and am willing to dedicate hours to the further pursuit of knowledge not because I have too, but because I want too. What – did I just write that?


I stumbled upon a book review while conducting my initial research on distributed learning. The book looked interesting enough to recommend it to my practicum supervisor. We then were able to receive the item through an interlibrary loan (the first one that I have ever requested, I might add). Three weeks quickly expired and I had to beg the ILL supervisor to give me another week. Of course, if you have been following my blog, you realize that I am pressure prompted, so the new due date forced me to concentrate all of my efforts on reading the book.

The book is entitled Teaching Information Literacy Online by Thomas Mackey, published in 2011. The book is broken into two main sections; the first covering hybrid learning and the second looking at purely online instruction. The first section is addressed in 4 chapters and highlights the integration of technology into face-to-face instruction in order to enhance student engagement. As this is not within the scope of our project, I ignored these chapters - - although I must admit they do look fascinating and I would like to return to them at a later date. The second section is also addressed through 4 chapters, 3 of which were relevant to our project. Side note: are you now wondering how it could have possibly taken me so long to read just 3 chapters of a book??? I would if I were you!

Now, here comes the challenging part - using a book for research that you do not own yourself. What do you do? You can not mark each page with notes – they would find me and I know they would as I am a branch supervisor and I find those that mark up books! You can not photocopy the book, because that is a violation of copyright. You can not break rules like these when you are an aspiring librarian. So what did I do…? I took a pad of sticky notes and recorded all of my thoughts and questions that way, sticking them to the individual pages; employing the use of arrows so that I would know what section of the page I was referring too. I then passed along the book to my practicum supervisor so that she could review the book as well. Once she has completed reading this book, I plan to transcribe all of our notes into a word document, which I am beating will be a very painful process.

All and all – an excellent book for anyone who is interested in information literacy instruction and finding inspiring ideas for student engagement within an academic institution.